Alternatives to Sex (8 page)

Edward’s street was a quiet refuge from the bustle of the city—dotted with low, meticulously renovated brownstones and recently planted trees that were still in full leaf that September night, with only the faint suggestion of autumn color. The rain of the preceding days had washed the streets and sidewalks, and the air smelled clean and sweet.

What I liked best about Edward’s neighborhood was the way new forty-story hotels and commercial buildings had been built up to the edge of the brownstones. That wall of steel and glass should have dwarfed and overwhelmed the brick houses like Edward’s, but instead, they created deep, cool shadows during the heat of the day and offered glittering light shows in the evening. Edward’s little apartment, I liked to imagine, was protected by this fortress of new construction.

“I do buy some age-appropriate clothes,” Edward said as we crossed through a garden with a sputtering fountain. His neighborhood was lousy with sputtering fountains. “I just haven’t started wearing them yet.”

“Take your time,” I told him and put my arm around his shoulder. “Once you start wearing age-appropriate clothes, there’s no turning back. Enjoy your folly while you can.”

Since last September, every middle-aged person I knew had decided to work on aging with grace and dignity. In light of what had happened, who would be shallow enough to even consider facial surgery or cosmetic injections? But thus far, none of my friends had perfected the plans for dignity. Edward was buying but not wearing age-appropriate clothes. My friend Miranda had stopped going out to nightclubs and was, instead, drinking at home alone. Tom had sworn off trying to pick up men half his age and had started paying for them instead. Laura had given up blaming her mother for all her problems and had started blaming her children. And so on.

Prompted by the resolutions of my friends, I had decided that continuing to see Didier, my Belgian sexual obsession of two or more years, was unbecoming for a man of my age. Undignified. He was a compulsive liar, a scrawny weasel, had the worst smoker’s cough I had ever heard, and for reasons that baffled me, I couldn’t get enough of him. I literally couldn’t get much of him since he was so spectacularly evasive, a key element of his appeal. In a fit of trumped up, posttraumatic, get-a-grip dignity, I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore and forbade him to call me. “I’m ready for something a little more real,” I’d told him. To distract myself, I’d lurched into the world of semianonymous computer hookups, behavior that hadn’t proved any more age-appropriate, although considering what my online age was, it didn’t, initially, look quite as bad.

I was finding my middle years tough. Optimistic youth is spent talking yourself into believing that at any moment you’ll do something bold, brave, and significant, while the calm post-sixty years are spent talking yourself into believing that you might have done something bold, brave, and significant but for bold, brave, significant, and unspecified reasons, you chose not to. At my age, I was living in the cold waters of semireality, trying to swim from one set of delusions to the temporary safe harbor of the next.

What did I want? I wondered as we crossed Tremont Street, my arm still on Edward’s shoulder. Edward was describing the antics of an obstreperous passenger on a flight from Dallas, a tale I was only half listening to. Why had I thought first of calling him when I decided to attempt making some changes in my own life?

A car ran a red light, and I grabbed Edward and reeled him in. He looked up at me, stopping his story midsentence, and I felt my cell phone vibrate in my pocket. “Go ahead and answer,” he said.

“You couldn’t have heard that,” I said, taking out the phone.

“You don’t think I felt it, do you?”

The number displayed on the screen was unknown to me, a warning sign I ignored. A muffled voice said, “Is this Everett?”

The most prudent thing to do would have been to hang up, but because I’m basically an honest person, I said, “Yes, it is.”

“Hey, Everett, this is Dave.”

Dave—who knows why?—is another wildly popular fake name. This guy even pronounced it as if there were quote marks around it.

“Dave. Right.”

“You’re in luck, Everett—I’m in town on business again.”

Apparently he remembered something I’d forgotten. “Okay.”

He named a hotel, a garish faux castle off the highway about fifteen minutes from the city that was inexplicably popular with out-of-town businessmen despite the fact that they had to drive through rush hour traffic to get to their meetings. “I’m in room 473. Come on out. I’m getting a group together.”

A few days ago, a call like this would have been a bonus—like having the waiter forget to charge you for the dessert. I would have figured out a way to finish dinner with Edward quickly and would have rushed to the hotel. But now it was just an unwelcome irritant. And fortunately, Edward was with me to keep me irritable. He was gazing straight ahead with a fixed, blank stare, indication that he probably was concentrating on how best to embellish the story about the passenger and finish it with a bang.

“I think you’ve got the wrong number,” I said.

“I don’t think I do. I recognize the voice. If you change your mind, you know where I am.” And then, continuing the theme from my earlier discussion with Edward: “The hotel has tons of free parking.”

“I don’t know why I bother carrying this thing,” I said to Edward, flipping it closed. “Almost all I get is wrong numbers and solicitations.”

“I know which that was.”

The restaurant Edward had selected was the kind of place I used to loathe as pretentious but now found soothing. Everything in it, walls and lamps and drapes and chairs, was the color of sand. It was so warmly monochromatic, all of the patrons seemed to glow with life—the point, undoubtedly—and the colorful food appeared to be leaping off the plates like Technicolor cartoon figures.

As soon as the waiter, a refreshingly homely man, had placed the salads in front of us and carefully adjusted the plates, I apologized to Edward for the invasive call.

“Why would it matter to me?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But you seemed annoyed. So I’m just saying, sorry.”

“Your sex life is your own business,” he said.

“You’re making assumptions.”

“I notice you didn’t say ‘false assumptions.’”

“Don’t be so critical. You’re important to me,” I said. I took a long sip of wine and felt it warm up little pockets of sentimentality all over my body. “You must know that.”

“Let’s not get maudlin,” he said. “It’s a little late in the friendship for that.” He pushed around the pile of tomatoes, drizzled with something green. “Why does everything have to be stacked? What happened to food lying on a plate?”

“It looks too much like airline food,” I told him.

“Shows what you know. There is no airline food anymore.”

“So what’s your big news, little man? What are these life-altering plans you wanted to discuss?”

He dispensed with a few slices of tomato and then said, without looking up from his cutlery, “Marty is moving out to San Diego in December and asked me to go along.” He glared at me for a moment, as if he’d just accused me of something. When he was satisfied that I’d absorbed his bombshell, he added, “I applied to the airline for a transfer.”

“Marty,” I said, dismissively, and immediately started digging through my salad to find the sugarcoated pecans.

Marty was Edward’s friend, someone I’d always disliked and felt in competition with. Marty exerted an unhealthy degree of influence over Edward. Edward was susceptible to the influence, not wholly benign, because Marty was his ideal of rugged, strutting masculinity: a retired marine who’d served in the first Iraq debacle in the early 1990s and then started a business that Marty (and Edward, Marty’s mouthpiece) claimed was raking in several hundred grand a year. In terms of domineering personality, unapologetic machismo, and bulky muscularity, Marty would have been a perfect lover for Edward. Unfortunately, for the sake of Edward’s romantic prospects, Marty was a woman. Martine, in fact. A stocky African-American woman from Arkansas with the captivating voice and precise articulation of a Shakespearean actress.

Marty had left the military about five years earlier and had started a self-help business that combined rigorous physical training and “empowerment and self-actualization” seminars. If you read between the lines of the promotional material on her Web site—the address was ReleaseTheBeast.com—the route to self-assertion was letting yourself be bullied into submission by Marty and doing exactly as she told you to do.

“She has a lot of contacts on the West Coast,” Edward went on. “San Diego is crawling with military and ex-military, her natural constituency, and she figures she can double her business within the first year.”

“I see. And where do you fit into the picture?”

“I need to make some changes, William. I need a new line of work. She’s going to have to have a business partner in all of this, to set up a new office, handle promotion, that kind of thing. It’s an opportunity for me, and it’s not as if I’m drowning in opportunities these days.”

“You don’t own a computer,” I reminded him.

“I’ve been taking classes. You’d be surprised at how adept I am. The whole thing makes a lot of sense.”

I was so irritated by this news, I pushed my plate away from me and leaned in toward Edward across the table and poked my finger into his flat, narrow chest. “It makes no sense at all, my friend. Do you want me to tell you why?”

“Not really.”

“In the first place, if Marty is doing so well with her business, as you’ve been claiming for years, why is she uprooting and moving three thousand miles? That’s a red flag right there. I guess you’re so dazzled by Marty’s beastliness, you don’t see it.” I stuffed some lettuce into my mouth. “You’ve got to think these things through. And you’re going to be flying
and
managing her business?”

“Only for a year. Then, if everything goes as planned, I’m quitting the airline. You’re jealous of my friendship with Marty. You always have been.”

“I’ve always been concerned about your friendship with Marty. She’s a petty dictator who makes a living—supposedly, but I haven’t seen her tax returns—by shouting at people eight hours a day.”

“Forget Marty for the moment,” he said. “The important thing is, it makes sense for me.”

“San Diego? All that sun? All those glaring, cloudless days? You burn easily, Edward. Your lips crack when you get too much sun. You think I don’t notice these things, but I do. You’ll blister and burn and dry up in that climate.”

Edward glared at me with a hard expression in his pale blue eyes. “Have a little sympathy for me,” he said. “Be a little more sensitive.”

“I am sympathetic, sweetheart. I know you want some changes, but you’re nearing forty. Just ride it out and do what everyone else does: get your teeth whitened and go on Zoloft.”

Out of nowhere, Edward’s small face collapsed into a look of crestfallen misery and his eyes clouded over. “You don’t get it, William. You don’t know me at all. I’m unhappy.”

There was so much bald emotion in this statement, I was speechless and hesitantly went back to my salad.

“For starters, there’s my job. Just when I got used to the idea of being in a low-prestige rut with benefits, the world turns upside down and I’m suddenly on the front lines of the ‘war on terror,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. You try it for a few months. Every time I get on a plane, I look around for a heavy object I can grab in case someone tries to slit my throat. It’s not what I signed up for. I went into it so I could wear a uniform and get paid to stare at guys’ crotches while I checked to see if their seat belts were fastened.”

“Edward…”

“And then there’s Boston. What am I doing here?” He looked around the restaurant with a smirk of dissatisfaction, already apart from the rest of the population. “I feel as if I’m hanging around waiting for something to happen, but what? What’s here for me?”

I had no illusions about Boston being the world’s most vibrant cosmopolitan center, but I took the comment personally. It’s standard operating procedure to weep and rage against a lover or spouse’s steps toward abandoning you, but for the most part, you’re supposed to applaud friends for doing the same, and then help them pack.

I wanted to say, “
I’m
here for you,” but instead of just blurting it out, I thought about whether or not I
was
there for Edward, and what the consequences of such a comment might be. Before I had time to say anything, the waiter strolled over to our table and asked for permission to take our salads. He had dark hair and a big, wide mouth, and his sand-colored T-shirt and stretchy pants could barely contain his compact body. I watched him as he walked off with the plates, trying to decide if the lack of an underwear line across the seat of his tight pants meant he was wearing a thong.

“You should slip him your phone number,” Edward said. “He’s one of those insecure, overdeveloped bottoms who loves to be humiliated. Letting himself be used by an emaciated fifty-year-old who lives in the kind of neighborhood you live in would appeal to his masochism.”

“I wish everyone would stop accusing me of being fifty,” I said. “Besides, I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking about your relocation plans.”

“Oh,” Edward scoffed, “you always claim you’re above lust and longing and all those other untidy human emotions. You don’t fool me for a minute. That pathetic phone call a few minutes ago. I’m broiling hot in this sweater, but without it, I’ll look like a candy striper. Why didn’t you insist I take off this ridiculous red-and-white jersey?”

“I don’t suppose it will be easy to get a transfer from the airline,” I said, hopefully. “They must have more important things to worry about than relocating you.”

He smiled at me in the cold way I imagine he smiled at passengers he ordered to take their seats as instructed by the pilot. “I heard yesterday,” he said. “It’s been approved. You’ll be happy to hear, I’ve decided to give you the listing on my apartment, but I know you’ll forgo the commission.”